Colorado Site Tackling Challenges of Field Trials for Children, Adolescents

The University of Colorado and the Children's Hospital of Denver have combined forces to provide DSM-5 field trial assessments of 275 pediatric patients. APA is moving forward with the DSM-5 field trial project and has been able to open four sites for assessment of pediatric patients as of March. Given the late start but the still-clear final deadline, sites have had to be creative and hard working to come close to the target number of patients they agreed to assess.

The Colorado site has taken on this challenge by recruiting a large number of clinicians, who include child psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers, as well as child psychiatry residents and psychology postdoctoral students, to perform the three required assessments of each child and the primary caregiver. According to Marianne Wamboldt, M.D., the site's principal investigator and division head of child psychiatry and chair of the Children's Hospital Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, this field trial has been an opportunity to bring a research mind set to a large clinical department. It is too early to discuss the merits of the proposed changes to the diagnostic system, but already trainees and clinical staff have benefitted from learning a more standardized approach to assessment, as well as the potential uses of patient/caregiver computerized input. This site has added on its own assessment of the caregiver-child relationship problem as a test of whether more specific criteria for this V code diagnosis will provide a more reliable assessment. They will also assess whether mental health professionals who work with children see the value of a standardized assessment of the caregiver-child relationship to be as clinically useful as assessment of Axis I diagnoses.